KVT – Silken Seduction
KVT is taken in – in an enigmatic way
It’s really worthwhile dropping into the Viet Art Centre before the 12th to see Vu Dinh Tuan’s paintings on silk.
I’ve been commenting more than favorably on Tuan’s silk paintings every time I’ve seen them on display…usually in collaborative exhibitions with other lecturers from the Fine Arts University and last November in a joint exhibition at the same venue. His recent silk paintings have loosened themselves from the woodprint series that I used to call – to myself – his Aubrey Beardsley ladies which were stunning and sometimes very sensuous ladies in deep blues and reds with gorgeously floral textile ornamentation. It was in November that I first saw these extremely seductive silk paintings and fell right under their spell.
The paintings are all rather enigmatic faces or enigmatic face shapes that have natural features around, in, across or behind them. They all seem to be lightly floating in space. Birds, flowers, fish, insects, clouds, simple landscapes are delicately, realistically, painstakenly painted.
They easily transgress being decorative and, although a couple may verge towards this appellation, most are simply beautiful and demand a lot of quiet inspection and reflection.
Last time I said that some had a sense of disquiet about them. This remains but more so now is the sense of deliberate seduction. At times you feel a stab of danger. A couple of times you may recoil with slight disgust. The faces are alluringly remote. Some are shy but all project that sense of mystery – and sometimes invitations to adventure. After lots of thinking my favorite is still the face shape enmeshed in fishing nets and schooling with blue and yellow fish …the mesh of the nets broken giving the fish the chance to escape, but like thoughts trapped in our minds or imaginations, do they really want to!
Though the paintings are tastefully arranged, they are oddly numbered and one has to run constantly to the equally tastefully mounted and hang, as if a work of art in itself (?) list of works, to check the corresponding names.
That was a major put off for me.
The works themselves deserve a careful viewing, bearing in mind the technical difficulties of the media: the capriciousness of the silk and no less demanding handling of watercolor.
The paintings stop short of crossing the border into the graphic arts/design territory simply because of the chosen media, but this trend is popular with the very young generation of artist and audience world wide…so… why not…